January 2025 (One Month - One Picture)
Explore Landscapes #74
This month’s image was shot after sunset during twilight when the sun cast some beautiful color onto the large cloud over the large inselberg in the background.
Sunset at Boy Scout Trailhead, Joshua Tree National Park | © 2025 Jon Norris
January 2025 | Joshua Tree (CA)
After some much-needed and enjoyable downtime with my family over the holidays, January started earnestly with multiple workshops: sunrise, day-to-sunset, and a weekend workshop.
A highlight for me was leading my first weekend workshop. Friday night featured a 3-hour classroom session to give everyone a good grounding in the essential techniques for landscape photography. Saturday was a sunrise-to-sunset field class held at multiple locations throughout the park to put what was learned in the classroom into practice. Finally, on Sunday, we had a 4-hour lesson that covered managing/importing photos into Lightroom and post-processing.
The last workshop of the month coincided with a snow flurry in Joshua Tree. Although we missed most of the snow, a sprinkling added interest to our photographs, as did the brooding, cloudy sky.
One prominent technique in almost all of my workshops is using the histogram (to prevent clipping of highlights and/or shadows) and exposure bracketing to increase the dynamic range in my images.
This month’s image was shot after sunset during twilight when the sun cast some beautiful color onto the large cloud over the large inselberg in the background. As this was shot after sunset, there was very little light on the foreground, but with exposure bracketing, I was able to combine seven images shot at different exposures to show both shadow and highlight detail.
Check out my workshops if you want to learn and become comfortable using this technique.
Sunrise from High View Nature Trail, Joshua Tree National Park | © 2020 Jon Norris
January 2020 | Big Bear (CA) | San Diego (CA) | Joshua Tree (CA) | Las Vegas (NV)
January wasn’t my best month for photography. I took plenty of photos, but almost none I feel I want to share. I’ve started to accept that on some trips, when you’re trying to balance photography with something else (like a trip with family or friends), it’s better to focus on your companions and the experience than do both half-heartedly.
I spent the last weekend of January in Joshua Tree National Park, primarily to take Rufus out on his first ’proper’ 4WD trails. A good friend and I had a great day wheeling Geology Tour Road, Berdoo Canyon, and Old Dale Road. Rufus got a proper shakedown, and I was impressed with how my stock Ranger handled the trails.
I got up at 5 am on Saturday to hike up High View Nature Trail to capture what was forecast to be a colorful sunrise. This image is an excellent example of what happens when you don’t give yourself enough time to get to your location. The color in the sky doesn’t materialize quite how you thought it would, and you go for some quickly grabbed images to try and justify why you got up so damn early.
The image is far from perfect, but it records the experience of hiking uphill in the dark and then taking in the beautiful view across the mountains as that day began.
On this occasion, the experience was far better than the resulting image.
